Starting from a Post-Keynesian model in which employment is determined by effective demand and the NAIRU is viewed as a limit to employment, enforced by monetary policy reacting upon conflict inflation, the effects of central bank independence and labour market institutions on macroeconomic performance are considered and the perspectives for employment and inflation in the European Monetary Uni...

Rogoff, 1985, suggested that central bank independence would lead to lower inflation but greater output variability. Alesina and Gatti, 1995, demonstrated Rogoff’s work was partial by only considering economic sources of output variability. By including political factors, circumstances could be identified when making a central bank independent could reduce both inflation and output variability....

We investigate the influence o f institutional arrangements on inflation in 18 OECD countries. The factors considered are, on the on hand institutional constraints on monetary policy such as the independence o f the Central Bank and commitment to fixed exchange rates and on the other political factors such as ideological and re-election motives. We find that an independent Central Bank has a di...

This paper uses a new data set on the term in office of central bank governors in 137 countries covering the period 1970-2004 to estimate a model for the chance that a central bank governor is replaced. We formulate a number of hypotheses based on the literature on the determinants of central bank independence that are tested using conditional logit models and the Extreme Bounds Analysis. We co...

Recently, Fischer [1996] and Posen [1998] demonstrated empirically that countries with less independent central banks enjoy lower output losses during disinflationary cycles. Since independence is presume to provide a credibility bonus to the monetary policy, this conclusion looks surprising. To explain their paradoxical result, these authors put forward that independent central banks probably ...

We study the monetary instrument problem in a model of optimal discretionary fiscal and monetary policy. The policy problem is cast as a dynamic game between the central bank, the fiscal authority, and the private sector. We show that, as long as there is a conflict of interest between the two policy-makers, the central bank’s monetary instrument choice critically affects the Markov-perfect Nas...